Abby Lawlor is a second-year JD candidate at Berkeley Law and a graduate student researcher at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Prior to law school, Abby worked as a strategic researcher for UNITE HERE Local 8 in Seattle. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law and a proud member of UAW 2865 and SRU-UAW.
Drawing insights from recent hard-won union negotiation campaigns, Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor look to the workers leading some of the toughest fights today to provide a masterclass in participatory social change.
A report by Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor, illustrates best practices for building the power to win in today’s challenging union climate and features a series of case studies in collective bargaining during the four years under Trump. They cover four key employment sectors: teachers, nurses, hotel workers, and journalists. In each case, workers used high transparency and high participation approaches in contract campaigns to build worker power. Each victory points a path to raising workers’ expectations of what is possible to win at the negotiations table today.
Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor join us today. They discuss how to extract concessions from intransigent employers and why the workers themselves (not an aloof, unresponsive team of professional negotiators) need to be at the heart of any negotiation.
A new report from Berkeley is a rare piece of good news for American labor—and a bracing reminder of what real organizing looks like.
